News about Sony as it relates to Linux

 Is Sony a Linux killer?, Aug 31, 2009

Most people welcomed the news that the Sony PlayStation 3 was slimming down, both in physical size and in terms of off the shelf pricing. The Linux crowd are not so impressed however.

After Sony's PS3 slim announcement last week, many fans were dismayed the new model would no longer include backwards compatibility and the option to run Linux as an alternative operating system.

As everybody had been more or less anticipating for months now, Sony has released the Playstation 3 Slim, a much smaller, lighter, and more energy-efficient variant of the regular Playstation 3. There's good news for people who held out on the PS3 because it was too expensive, and there's bad news for those of us who liked the idea of running Linux on the PS3.

PS3 can't run Microsoft Windows or Apple's OS X but it can run Linux operating systems. There are many Linux varieties, but our favorite is Ubuntu. And it turns out that the open-source community has created a program called kboot that helps load Ubuntu onto the PS3.

While we're sure a number of you have a Yellow Dog Linux-equipped PS3 around for leisure's sake, Axion Racing is using a similar setup to "manage one of seven autonomous vehicle cameras."

Linux distributor TerraSoft is accepting pre-orders for Sony Playstation3 gaming devices pre-installed with Linux, alongside the PS3's native gaming OS. Additionally, TerraSoft, IBM, RapidMind, and Vivendi game publisher High Moon Studios are offering seminars to help game developers exploit the PS3's Cell architecture.

A self-described "world famous celebrity hacker" has managed to boot uClinux on Sony's MIPS-based PSP (Playstation Portable).

Sony-contributed patches aimed at adding machine-specific features for the PlayStation 3 (PS3) have been merged into the stable 2.4.20 kernel tree.

Running Linux on your Playstation 3 has been possible for two weeks now, but to test how the machine performs with various applications, a benchmark program had to be adapted to run on it. A guy over at Geek Patrol did this and found out the Console is about as fast as a Pentium 3 800MHz, a 6 year old processor.

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